Cold Tea for Brandy — A Tale of Protest, Painting & Politics
By Joan Coxsedge
Vulcan Press, 2007
$39.95 or $30 + postage from the author, (03) 9857 9249
The Vietnam War and the frenetic years of anti-war activity were seminal to the political lives of a generation of activists like Joan Coxsedge. She explains this in her autobiography, Cold Tea for Brandy — A Tale of Protest, Painting and Politics, published in late 2007.
Life had been relatively routine until the Vietnam War, growing up in a working class family in the '30s and '40s. The social rituals and atmosphere of that era are portrayed well in the book. It captures working class life (a friend in her 70s told me she particularly enjoyed the early chapters of life in the '30s and '40s when she too grew up), school at MacRobertson Girls High, nursing (one of the few career paths available for young women), art class and a passion for painting and drawing that led to exhibitions here and overseas. Plans to travel overseas were interrupted by marriage — and then...
The Indo-Chinese road to Damascus of course meandered through Spring St (Victorian parliament) on the way. An unexpected preselection left Coxsedge in parliament, never likely to rise from the back benches of a Labor party becoming increasingly conservative. Unlike most parliamentary memoirs — in which the career in the corridors dominates and its import balloons by the year — in Joan Coxsedge's "tale of protest, painting and politics" the parliamentary politics are but a sideshow spent in a shared office in the rabbit-warren bowels of the parliament.
Coxsedge admits enjoying the electoral work, the opportunity to assist her working-class western suburbs electorate. She earned the hostility of both sides of parliament when she unleashed a stink bomb — the "Smorgon's Stink Bomb" — into the refined atmosphere of the upper house to demonstrate the impact of noxious industries on her constituents. "It took days for the air to return to normal," she says.
There has been little else normal about Coxsedge's activities. In the '70s she launched a campaign against the myriad of secret police agencies with the Committee for the Abolition of Political Police tracking agents, their activities and their paranoia with anything or anyone vaguely left. Many laws, including harsh penalties for releasing the identity of spies and secret agents, resulted from these activities. Under today's anti-terrorist legislation Coxsedge would probably never see the light of day again.
Cold Tea for Brandy describes Coxsedge's work for civil liberties, against uranium mining and the nuclear industry, and through the burgeoning feminist movement.
There are many chapters on her international involvement; political travels ranging from the Pacific Islands to Greenham Common, mainland Europe to Cuba. She is still president of the Melbourne branch of the Australia Cuba Friendship Society.
I found the most absorbing part of the book to be Coxsedge's adventures in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the period of imperialist exploitation, death squads and CIA dirty tricks. It reads like a riveting spy novel — the tensions, fears and threats captured explicitly. Just as explicitly emerges the commitment and bravery of a population living every day with the threat of disappearance and extermination.
Coxsedge also writes at length of her visits to Cuba as an activist/artist, of capturing the beauty of an architecture struggling to survive the material shortages of the United States' embargo, the logistics of transporting an exhibition from Melbourne to Havana — but more particularly the resilience, the courage, the vivacity, the determination and the outstanding social achievements of a people committed to their revolution. It provides a starkly contrasting view to that presented by the US establishment and mirrored by most Australian politicians and mainstream media.
Coxsedge details a visit to Vietnam organised by the Vietnamese government in 2001, to say a thank you to the Fairlea Five, 30 years after Joan and her four Save Our Sons sisters were jailed for occupying the Department of Labour and National Services offices in Melbourne to encourage young people to resist the draft. Late on that Easter Thursday in 1971, a carefully chosen magistrate aligned to the ultra-conservative League of Rights put the five protesters into Fairlea women's prison for 14 days.
Coxsedge's descriptions of the stultifying routine of prison life nonetheless reveal a compassion for her co-prisoners, who were almost exclusively from deprived social economic circumstances. Indeed the author emerges not just as an artist and activist writing yet another memoir for its own sake, but as an excellent writer with a story to tell from a political perspective that has come under constant barrage from the forces of the status quo.
If there is a criticism of Cold Tea for Brandy, there could have been fewer anecdotes of routine travel and accommodation problems, but they do not detract from a well-written account and political analysis of an activist who continues to stick it to the powers that be.